This course is for teachers to learn why some children have so much difficulty with reading and writing, often called 'dyslexia', and to learn more about best practice in teaching literacy to all in light of recent scientific discoveries.
Participation in or completion of this online course will not confer academic credit for University of London programmes

Taught By

Dr Jenny Thomson

Dr Vincent Goetry

Transcript

Hello again. Now we are going to talk about some very simple and inexpensive tools which you can use to teach the two basic principles of phonic methods, which are the teaching of phonological and phonemic awareness and the teaching of the grapheme phoneme correspondences. If you think about it, it's sort of obvious to teach those two components, because in alphabetical languages like English, the link between spoken language and written language is done precisely at the level of the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. The first point that I would like to stress is teach explicitly, deliberately, and systematically. Usually, children with dyslexia will have difficulties making inferences, so anything should be really spelled out. When you teach phonemic awareness, it's very important because, as you can see on that representation of a sentence which is called a spectrogram. So imagine that you utter a sentence and this is being recorded with a microphone linked to a machine ... which record the vibration of the air which is used by the expiration of the air from your lungs. Now, on this particular example that you see, the sentence is 'To return to the main menu, press the start key.' Now what strikes you? The striking thing is that there is no pause between words; all the words are mixed up with each other. This phenomenon is called co-articulation; we have already talked about co-articulation, and you'll find the definition in the Glossary. So actually, contrary to what we may think, this is completely counter intuitive. There is no pause between words when we are speaking. The pause(s) are made by the listener. The pause(s) are in the head of the listener and not in the throat of the speaker, if I may say so. So, based on very specific acoustic properties of speech, we are able to segment that chunk, which is continuous when we hear someone, into words and to segment the words into phonemes because we are literate. But remember that a child who has not learned to read and write and spell yet has to deal with this mixture of sound(s) which are mixed with each other; and actually many linguists use the analogy of an omelet. Speech is actually an omelet, scrambled eggs, and it is the listener, thanks to the representation of the phonemes, and thanks to acoustical cues, who is going to be able to put pauses between words and between phonemes within words. The child does not (do) that explicitly so that's why you need to teach it explicitly. At the same time, as I already mentioned, the children should be taught the alphabetic principle, so the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. And as I said earlier, this reinforces the development of phonemic awareness, as phonemic awareness influences the acquisition of the alphabetic principle, the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. As I said earlier, remember when we talked about the informal assessment, I have proposed eight different tasks which you can use to see whether children with dyslexia have difficulties manipulating the sounds and playing with the sounds in words. Now, as I stressed and I stress it again here, you can also use this activity to help them develop phonemic representation which will be more complete, less 'fuzzy', more precise. And so, let's go through these activities again, with an introduction as you see in the film. You can use a puppet, you can use a doll, and you can introduce several activities to the children. Of course you need to modify the presentation, the introduction of these activities, depending on the age of the pupils you are working with. This might seem obvious, but of course it is easier to start with shorter words, so that you donât overload auditory short term memory of the children, and then to move on to longer words in subsequent weeks. Working with phonemes is more complicated than working with onsets and rimes, which is more complicated than working with syllables. Let's say we are having a friend called 'Blap', but for sake of change, we are going to call our little creature coming from another planet, 'Ming'. So for the generation task, as you see In the film, you can ask the pupil, 'Well Ming is a little bit, feels ill at ease. He or she is completely lost coming from another planet and we are going to say words which are ending the same way as his name.' And so for Ming, you can think about many words, like 'ring', 'bring', 'king', 'wing', 'making', 'pushing', etc. You can also, you can ask the children, if they have difficulties with using real words, to invent other words to come up, to make up pseudowords. And that's true for all the phonological awareness task(s). Now if you move onto the second task, the detection task, you can explain that Ming is feeling more at ease, but she wants to learn English. She wants to learn our language. Because of the sounds of the language are so different from its own, it will need to have more sounds to help It identifying the English sounds and eventually learn them. So everyone is going to give three words. And the task of Ming is to spot the word which is not ending or beginning the same way as the two other words. For example, you can say, 'Pet', 'set', 'mop'. Which one doesn't go with the two others? 'Bang', 'stuff', 'hang'. So this is an exercise on the rime. 'Stand', 'grin', 'spin'. Again, rime detection. If you move onto the next task which is concatenation, you can say, 'well Ming is very, very hesitant and so, she will say words but because she's very unsure of the words, she says the words bit by bit.' You can start here with syllables. I give you an example already but I may give another one. 'Sis - ter'. What did Ming mean to say? (she) meant to say 'sister'. Or. Con - tact. Or pi - lot. If you're working with phonemes, Ming may have said m - a - t, what word is it, 'mat', 'mm - oo - n', 'moon'. 'S - t - ep', 'step'. What you can do is to prerecord If you have the materials and the facilities to do that, you can prerecord someone else's voice so that it really induces an interactive relationship between Ming and the children. So you really pretend that Ming has recorded these words before entering the classroom and that you are playing the recording. You can also mix up words and pseudo words in this task, and say, well, Ming tries to say words in English but sometimes she says things which are completely invented. They do not belong to the English language, so you can read word like 's', 'i', 'n', 'g', 'sing', and you can have 't', 'r', 'a', 'n', 'k', and then you can introduce a word like 'trank' for trank which doesn't exist in English.

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